Refugees in a temporary shelter, Kishinev (now Chişinău, Moldova), ca. 1914–1917. On the wall is a poster for the Holland America Line, one of the steamship companies that carried European emigrants to the United States and elsewhere. (YIVO)

By the end of the twentieth century, most of the East European Jews who survived the Holocaust and their descendants had moved overseas. The migration that occurred before World War II saved many Jewish lives. Between 1919 and 2005, the total volume of Jewish international migration from Eastern Europe can be roughly estimated at about 3.8 million (for 1969–2005, this figure includes non-Jewish relatives of Jews); of these, approximately 1.95 million went first to Palestine/Israel, and 1.85 million to other countries (see Table 1: Jewish International Migration from Eastern Europe, 1919-2005). Subsequently, part of the former moved on to Western countries; at the same time, a smaller percentage of the latter re-migrated to Palestine/Israel. Internal migration also played a very important role in the demographic development of this Jewry, especially in a country as large as the former Soviet Union (FSU).

International Migration between the Two World Wars

The first sizable wave of post–World War I Jewish international migration from Eastern Europe occurred in 1918–1921, when more than 200,000 Jews emigrated from Soviet Russia to different European countries, mostly through neighboring Poland and Romania; they settled chiefly in Germany, and later in France. In the first years of the 1920s, however, many of these refugees joined the general Jewish migration movement to the United States and Palestine. Moreover, some migrated to these destinations later—especially those who escaped Germany after Hitler’s seizure of power—but in migration statistics they sometimes appeared as immigrants who originated from Russia/Soviet Union. For this reason the number of Jews who immigrated directly from Soviet Russia to the United States and Palestine is rather unclear.

Farewell dinner for members of Mizraḥi leaving for Palestine, Warsaw, ca. 1930s. (YIVO)

Between the wars about 289,200 Jews from Eastern Europe were registered on arrival in the United States (see Table 2: Immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States, 1920-1939), and for this whole period their share among all Jewish immigrants to that country was 64 percent. More than half (57 percent; 164,900 Jews) of these immigrants from Eastern Europe originated from Poland. The highest total number of East European Jewish immigrants (103,700) arrived in the 1921 fiscal year; this figure was rather close to the annual level in the pre–World War I period. In that year for the first time, serious immigration restrictions were introduced by the United States, and the number of immigrants decreased between two- and threefold over the following three years. The great majority of interwar Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to the United States (225,200, or 78 percent), however, had arrived there by 1924. Following the establishment of even more severe restrictions in that year, the number of East European migrants to the United States dropped dramatically, and for a long period the United States ceased to be a major destination for East European Jewish migration.

Between the two world wars about 210,000 Jews from Eastern Europe were registered on arrival in Palestine (see Table 3: Immigration of Jews to Palestine from Eastern Europe, 1919-1948), and for this whole period their share was about two-thirds of all Jewish immigrants to this destination. About two-thirds (66 percent; 138,900 Jews) of these immigrants from Eastern Europe originated in Poland. In 1925, due to the closure of America’s gates, Palestine for the first time temporarily became the preferred destination for Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, and more than 29,000 immigrants from this region were registered there. However, the subsequent serious economic crisis in Palestine in 1926–1927 led to a dramatic decrease of Jewish migration to that destination. In the mid-1930s, with pressure on European Jewry rising, Palestine, with its growing absorption capacity, again became the leading destination for world Jewish migration. In 1935, immigration reached a new peak; about 45,000 arrivals from Eastern Europe were registered there. In 1939, the British imposed severe obstacles to Jewish immigration to Palestine (the White Paper), and clandestine movement to this destination became rather sizable.

Between the wars Poland was the largest source of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe (about 400,000 recorded emigrants), and the data show the increased role of Canada, Argentina, and Brazil as places of destination, especially in the second half of the 1920s (see Table 4: Emigration of Jews from Poland, 1921-1937). For Jews in different countries there were some specific destinations, for example, from Lithuania many Jewish emigrants tended to go to South Africa.

Internal Migration and Urban Concentration in the Interwar Period

Members of the Heifetz and Glick families en route to the United States, Danzig (now Gdańsk, Pol.), 1921. (YIVO)

Between the world wars the scale of internal migration of Soviet Jewry was possibly not lower than international movement of Jews from Eastern Europe: by the start of World War II more than 1 million Soviet Jews were first-generation migrants from the former tsarist Pale of Settlement. In 1920, there were only about 28,000 Jews in Moscow and 25,000 in Saint Petersburg. By 1939 this situation had changed completely, and about half of Russia’s greatly increased Jewish population resided in these two capital cities: approximately 250,000 in Moscow and 202,000 in Saint Petersburg. In two Ukrainian cities the Jewish population also exceeded 200,000—there were about 224,000 in Kiev and 201,000 in Odessa. Data from the 1939 census show that approximately 87 percent of Soviet Jews were urban residents, and almost half (46 percent) of this urban Jewish population lived in cities of at least 500,000.

In other countries of Eastern Europe socioeconomic development was rather stagnant during this period, causing serious obstacles to the process of urbanization and concentration among the Jewish population in countries such as Poland and Romania. The number of Jews in Warsaw grew from 310,000 in 1921 to 352,700 in 1931 and to 368,500 in 1938, and less than 12 percent of the Polish Jewish population lived in the country’s capital. At the same time, Warsaw was the largest center of Jewish urban concentration in the whole of Europe. According to the 1931 census, 202,500 Jews lived in Poland’s second largest city, Łódź; however, among all its other cities, only in Lwów did the number of Jews approach 100,000. Census data show that the Jewish share of the total urban population in Poland actually decreased between 1921 and 1931 from about 31 to 27 percent. According to the 1931 census 23.6 percent of all Jews in the country were rural residents.

According to the 1930 Romanian census, 76,500 Jews lived in the country’s capital, Bucharest (about 10 percent of Romania’s total Jewish population). Only slightly more than 10 percent of Slovakia’s Jews lived in the capital city of Bratislava (in 1930, less than 15,000). At the same time, almost half the Jews in Bohemia lived in its capital, Prague (in 1930, about 35,400). In the interwar period approximately half (in 1935, about 200,000) of Hungary’s Jews were concentrated in Budapest.

Migration and Displacement during World War II and Its Aftermath

During the time of the Holocaust, a period of tragedy for Jews in general and for East European Jews in particular, migration played a fateful role. After the outbreak of war in 1939 about 0.2–0.3 million Jewish refugees from the Nazi-occupied area of Poland went to the part of Poland that fell under Soviet control or to the Baltic States (mostly Lithuania) which in 1940—as well as Bessarabia and northern Bucovina—were also incorporated into the Soviet Union. In 1940–1941 some of these refugees, as well as some local Jews from the Soviet-annexed areas—in all, possibly about 0.1 million—in the framework of general Soviet policy against suspected and “hostile” elements were exiled to remote areas of the USSR (i.e., Siberia and others). Paradoxically, this forced transfer saved the lives of many of these Jews because the chances for survival were much higher for them than for those who fell into the hands of the Nazis. Moreover, in the preparation for, and execution of, the Holocaust, forced migrations and transports of the Jews to the places of their extermination were an integral part of this unparalleled mass killing.

Crowd of emigrants in the shipping office of the Red Star-American Line, Warsaw, 1921. Photograph by Alter Kacyzne for the American organization HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). (Forward Association/YIVO)

At the same time, in 1941, after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, Jews retreated en masse with and in the ranks of the Red Army, and further evacuation and flight in 1942, when the Wehrmacht resumed its advance, saved their lives. The precise number of Jews who fled Nazi-occupied Soviet territory is unclear; moreover, most Jews were evacuated from the two unoccupied Soviet capital cities—Moscow and Saint Petersburg. However, it is obvious that the total number of Jews who migrated temporarily in this period to the interior of the Soviet Union exceeded 1 million, and possibly, with those who later settled permanently in the places of their evacuation, it approached 1.5 million.

In 1944 to 1948, based on agreements between Poland and the Soviet authorities concerning the repatriation of former Polish citizens and their relatives, almost 175,000 Jews were allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Poland; most of these migrants arrived in the first half of 1946. Another sizable international movement—in early 1946 more than 22,000—resulted from the Soviet decision to permit some of the Jews of northern Bucovina who were former Romanian citizens to migrate to Romania. Most of the returnees as well as other survivors left Poland in the first years after liberation, and formed a majority of the Beriḥah, the clandestine, Zionist-organized mass movement of Jews from Eastern Europe following the Holocaust. They were temporarily settled in the displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy.

Consequently, the former DPs formed the great majority among the immigrants from Poland in the new State of Israel whose establishment led to unrestricted Jewish immigration to this destination. Between December 1949 and March 1951, however, another 28,000 Jews arrived in Israel directly from Poland. In sum, between 15 May 1948 and the end of 1951, 105,300 immigrants originating in Poland were registered in Israel (see Table 5: Immigration of Jews and Their Non-Jewish Relatives to Israel from Eastern Europe, 1948-2005). The most sizable migration movement to Israel in this period (116,500) originated in Romania; the numbers of immigrants from Czechoslovakia (18,400) and Hungary (14,000) were much smaller. Direct emigration from the Soviet Union to Israel was almost totally forbidden up to the end of Stalin’s reign, and immigrants counted in Israeli statistics as having arrived from this country were in fact DPs who originated from the previously independent Baltic States, or possibly from China (i.e., Harbin). All in all, approximately 132,000 DPs were absorbed by Israel; of these most were originally from the countries of Eastern Europe. The rest of the Jewish DPs resettled primarily in North and South America; of these, between 1949 and 1951 about 63,400 went to the United States. In 1950 the Israeli parliament (Knesset) enacted special legislation on unselective Jewish immigration—the Law of Return (amended in 1970 to include Jews, their children and grandchildren, and all respective spouses in the group of persons eligible for immigration to Israel [aliyah]).

Cold-War Emigration from Soviet Satellite Countries

Jewish displaced persons waving goodbye to friends and relatives as they leave Germany for France en route to Israel, 1948, under the auspices of Beriḥah, the clandestine, Zionist-organized mass movement. Photograph by Alex Hochhauser. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Alex Hochhauser)

Large-scale emigration of Jews from Soviet satellite countries resumed in the second half of the 1950s. In 1955–1960, about 51,000 persons left Poland who declared Israel as their country of destination. However, in this period only about 42,600 Jews (Table 5) and 1,500 of their non-Jewish relatives arrived there from Poland. In fact, many of these people had been in Poland only in transit—in 1955–1959, in the framework of a new wave of Polish repatriation, more than 18,700 Jews left the USSR—and most of them subsequently re-emigrated to Israel.

After the unsuccessful Hungarian revolution in 1956 about 20,000 Jews and their relatives left Hungary. In 1956–1957, more than 8,000 of these immigrants arrived in Israel. Many of them went to the West, and the total number of Hungarian escapees of Jewish origin and their relatives admitted by the end of 1957 to the United States was about 5,100; the number of those who emigrated to Canada was close to 4,000.

In 1958 mass Jewish emigration resumed from Romania, and by 1966, more than 106,200 Jews had arrived in Israel from there. Romanian authorities permitted this emigration on condition of secret payments by the receiving country, mostly in the form of merchandise, for exit permits for the Jews.

An “anti-Zionist campaign” in Poland (1967–1968) led to the emigration of about 20,000 Jews, people of Jewish origin, and intellectuals sometimes only loosely related to Jews but who were so accused. As a rule, persons under antisemitic attack were forced to leave the country on Israeli visas. Consequently, according to the official Polish archival data, between 1967 and 1971 about 13,000 emigrants noted Israel as their country of destination. However, less than 4,000 people actually arrived in Israel from Poland; the majority chose Sweden, the United States, France, and other countries. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw pact armies in August 1968, about one-third of its Jews left the country; once again, the majority went to the West.

In 1969 Romania and Israel reached another secret agreement by the terms of which the receiving country would pay money for exit permits in return for the restarting of Jewish emigration; similar secret agreements were arranged until the end of the Ceausescu era. Between 1969 and 1989, under these conditions 39,600 Jews and their relatives immigrated from Romania to Israel (Table 5).

Large-Scale Soviet Emigration in the 1970s and Its Reduction in the 1980s

For many years Soviet Jews, like all other citizens of the USSR, had no real possibility to emigrate in sizable numbers. This situation changed dramatically in the 1970s. Large-scale emigration began in 1971 when about 13,000 Soviet Jews and their relatives left the country. In 1972 and 1973, more than 31,000 and 34,000 emigrated, respectively. However, the number of permits for emigration in the following years decreased: in 1974 less than 21,000 Jews and their relatives left the USSR, and only 13,000 to 16,000 did so in each of the years 1975–1977. The next three years saw an increase, and the peak of this wave of emigration occurred in 1979, when more than 51,000 Soviet Jews and their relatives emigrated. Jewish emigration was again severely restricted by the Soviet authorities in the years that followed. In 1982–1986 as a whole, less than 7,000 Soviet Jews and their relatives left the country. Afterward the situation again changed for the better under Perestroika, and in 1987 and 1988, more than 8,000 and 19,000, respectively emigrated.

In total in 1969–1988, about 294,000 Soviet Jews and their relatives emigrated from the country, the majority—approximately 168,000—to Israel (see Table 6: Emigration of Jews and Their Non-Jewish Relatives from the Soviet Union, 1969-1988)). In all these years Jewish emigrants left the USSR with Israeli visas, and in the first half of the 1970s only 7.5 percent of them went to destinations other than Israel. However, in 1976–1977 about half of the total number of emigrants from the Soviet Union with Israeli visas changed their destination, mostly for the United States.

Soviet Internal Migration and Urban Concentrations after World War II

The Jewish migratory balance between Ukraine and other Soviet republics, especially Russia, was negative until the late 1980s. A situation similar to Ukraine’s existed in Belorussia. Many young Jews from these two Slavic republics emigrated to Russia, mainly for the purpose of receiving higher education. A comparison of Jewish birth cohort dynamics in the three republics reveals this aspect of Jewish population change. These dynamics were very different in Russia than in the other two Slavic republics: between the 1959 and 1970 censuses the size of the 1944–1953 birth cohort (which in 1959 was mostly of school age) grew by 12 percent in Russia, and became smaller by 10–11 percent in Ukraine and Belorussia. Even in 1979, the size of this birth cohort in Russia was still greater than in 1959, despite some return migration to the republics of birth and emigration outside the Soviet Union. The overall results of the differences in migration movements were so large that in 1989 the size of the 1944–1953 birth cohort in Russia was only 7 percent less than in 1959, whereas over the same period the size of this birth cohort had fallen by 36 percent in Ukraine and 31 percent in Belorussia. A similar situation, although not as pronounced, existed for the earlier 1934–1943 birth cohort according to the census data. At the same time, the dynamics of the much older 1904–1913 birth cohort were very similar in the three republics.

According to the first post–World War II Soviet census, taken in 1959, there were 239,000 Jews in Moscow and 169,000 in Saint Petersburg, respectively 27 and 19 percent of Russia’s Jewish population (including those who were recorded as “Tats”). According to the last Soviet census of 1989, at the start of the recent great emigration about 177,000 (31 percent) of the Jews in the Russian Federation lived in Moscow and 107,000 (19 percent) in Saint Petersburg (including those who were recorded as “Tats”). Russia’s provincial Jewry was not homogeneous: in 1989 less than one-third lived in 10 large cities with a million or more inhabitants, about one-sixth lived in 22 cities with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million, and approximately one-half were dispersed among other cities and towns, with a few in rural settlements as well. Between 1959 and 1989 the number of Jews in the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev fell from 153,500 to 100,600, and its share in Ukraine’s Jewish population slightly increased from 18 to 21 percent. During the same period the number of Jews in the Belorussian capital city of Minsk was rather stable: 38,800 in 1959 and 39,100 in 1989, but its share in Belorussia’s Jewish population had increased very sizably from 26 to 35 percent.

Dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Great Emigration

In the 1990s mass emigration in general, and in particular that to Israel, played a very important role in the fate of the Jews in the FSU. According to estimated figures, between 1989 and 2005 about 1.6 million (ex-)Soviet Jews and their relatives emigrated to countries outside the FSU (see Table 8: Emigration of Jews and Their Non-Jewish Relatives from the FSU, 1989-2005). Approximately 61 percent of this movement (971,600) was directed toward Israel, whereas the rest was divided mostly between the United States and Germany. During this period the number of Jews and their relatives who emigrated from the FSU to the United States may be estimated at more than 320,000. The number of Jews and their relatives who emigrated to Germany was lower, but even this approached 220,000.

Estimated figures show that total emigration peaked in the last two years of severe crises that preceded the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 1990 and 1991, when 90 and 76 percent of the emigrants went to Israel, respectively. From 1992 to 1998, slightly more than half of those who emigrated to countries outside the FSU chose Israel. In the 1990s the United States introduced quotas and restricted the possibility of ex-Soviet Jewish immigration to only those persons who had close relatives who were in the United States, and between 1991 and 1996 the United States ranked second as a receiving country.

However, from 1997 to 2001, more emigrants went to Germany than to the United States, and Germany, which had in the beginning of the 1990s introduced a special program for Jewish immigration from the FSU, became the second-ranking receiving country. After 11 September 2001, the United States ceased to be a major destination for post-Soviet Jewish emigration. From 2002 to 2004 more emigrants went to Germany than to Israel, and Germany temporarily became the first-ranking receiving country. In 2005, after Germany’s admission policy became much more restrictive, the number of Jews and their relatives who emigrated to Germany dropped, and Israel again became the first-ranking receiving country for ex-Soviet Jewish emigration.

According to estimates for 1989–2001, among Jews and their relatives who emigrated to the United States the absolute number of Ukrainian Jews and their relatives was higher by 1.6 times than that from the Russian Federation; the absolute number of Ukrainian Jews and their relatives who emigrated to Germany was even twice that of those from the Russian Federation (see Table 7). As a consequence, among FSU emigrants to the United States, and especially to Germany, the share of those who originated from Ukraine was predominant—41 and 56 percent, respectively; the share of those who emigrated to these two countries from the Russian Federation was much lower—26 and 27 percent, respectively. In the same period, among FSU emigrants to Israel the numbers and consequently the shares of those who originated in Ukraine and the Russian Federation were about the same—33 and 32 percent, respectively.

One consequence of the post-Soviet Jewish vital crisis and rising mixed marriage was the pronounced decrease in the share of Jews among the FSU immigrants as seen in the official Israeli data: 96 percent in 1990, 72 percent in 1995, 47 percent in 2000 (of the immigrants whose ethnicity/religion was known). However, in 2000, according to Israeli criteria, Jews and their nearest relatives (non-Jewish spouses and non-Jewish children of Jews) constituted 78 percent of all immigrants from the FSU countries; the others were spouses of non-Jewish children of Jews, and non-Jewish grandchildren of Jews and their spouses. Among FSU emigrants to other destinations, especially to Germany, the percentage of non-Jewish relatives of Jews was also high.

Post-Soviet Redistributions and Urban Concentrations

In 1989–1991, just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia’s Jewish migration balance was slightly negative with all parts of the country except Transcaucasia and Central Asia. Since 1992 immigration of Jews from the Baltic States and Moldova has exceeded Jewish emigration from the Russian Federation to these republics. Since 1994, Russia has had a positive Jewish migration balance with the Jews from Ukraine. Between 1992 and 1998 Russia’s registered Jewish migratory balance with other FSU successor states was positive, and this by more than 6,800. There were two principal sources of immigration to the Russian Federation: Transcaucasia and Central Asia. These two regions are the most conflict-ridden areas in the former Soviet Union, and in some cases emigration to Russia was simply a way for Jews to escape ethnic conflicts and wars. For this period Russia’s registered positive migration balance was approximately 2,800 for movements of the Jews to and from Transcaucasia, and more than 2,700 for those from Central Asia.

According to the data of the 2002 Russian census, about 80,400 (35 percent) of the Jews in the Russian Federation lived in Moscow, more than 36,600 (16 percent) in Saint Petersburg, and 116,500 (49 percent) in the provinces outside these two cities. As a result of mass internal migration, despite the previous strict Soviet restrictions on resettlement in the two Russian capital cities, according to the data of the same census, of the total number of their Jewish inhabitants, more than 47 percent in Moscow and 41 percent in Saint Petersburg were born outside the respective city. According to the data of the 2001 Ukrainian census, only about 18,000 (17 percent) of the total number of Jews in the country lived in its capital city Kiev, while a sizable number were in other large cities: 12,400 (12 percent) in Odessa, 11,200 (11 percent) in Khar’kiv, and 10,500 (10 percent) in Dnipropetrovs’k. At the same time, according to the 1999 Belarusian census, a much higher share of Jewish population is concentrated in that country’s capital city—the number of Jews in Minsk was 10,100 (36.5 percent).

Consequences of East European Migration

There are in the contemporary world only two main demographic concentrations of Jews who originated from Eastern Europe—North America and Israel. After the Holocaust, under the circumstances of the cold war and later in the course of the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union, the great majority of remaining Jews emigrated from the region. The post–World War II immigrants to the United States joined the many who had arrived much earlier from Eastern Europe, and as a whole they and their descendants now form the great majority of this, the most sizable Diaspora Jewish community. According to the first population registration of November 1948, immigrants constituted the great majority of Israel’s Jewish population, and among them the share of those from Eastern Europe was as high as 65 percent. After subsequent waves of immigration from different origins, Ashkenazic Jews have almost retained their majority of Israel’s Jewish population, and among them, the share of those from Eastern Europe and their descendants is predominant.

Migration has been a positive factor in Jewish demographic dynamics. It caused additions to Jewish population as a result of ethnic reidentification in the process of migration. The estimates (which use the 1970 Soviet census as a baseline) show that, by the beginning of 2004, worldwide there were about 1.6 million “core” Jews (by self-identification) who originated in the FSU, of whom about one-tenth, mostly in Israel, had become part of the “core” Jewish population as a result of migration. In Israel there were about 0.8 million Jews who had arrived since 1970 from the FSU and their descendants (approximately half of the estimated worldwide number). Perhaps a fifth of them had previously neither identified themselves, nor had been seen by FSU authorities, as Jews. According to the same estimates, at the beginning of 2004 less than one-quarter (less than 0.4 million) remained in the FSU, and the rest were mostly in the United States (about 0.3 million) and Germany (less than 0.1 million). Moreover, Jews who emigrated to Israel not only escaped the dramatic fertility reduction characteristic of the FSU population as a whole and Jews in particular, but also their life expectancy rose considerably. The post-Soviet mass exodus led to tens of thousands of additional Jewish births among those Jews who emigrated, most of which have occurred in Israel, and has postponed deaths of many immigrants in all places of their arrival.